Install MinGW

Once you have downloaded MinGW run the installer, MinGW comes bundled with MSYS, and extra compilers. You must install MSYS, and the C/C++ compiler as they are required.

Install Mono

Once MinGW is installed properly we are going to install Mono, this includes the compiler we will use to compile our SwinGame code. You can get the most recent version of Monofrom here.

Once you've run the installer you will now need to add the Mono/bin directory to your Windows PATH. If you don't know how, you can follow this tutorial.

You can test to see if everything has worked by opening MinGW and typing 'which gmcs', this should print the path where mono was installed.

Do not install Mono to a path that has spaces! So not Program Files for example...

Get SwinGame

Now that our environment is setup we need to get a SwinGame project template, this template is the one that you will use to develop your games with. You can find the command line .NET template in the Downloads section.

Once you've downloaded the template extract it, ideally you should try to extract it to a path with no spaces, somewhere like 'C:/Code/'. You can then rename the folder 'Project Template' to your game name.

Now we're going to test it, open MinGW and use the cd (Change Directory) command to move into the project template. If your game is at 'C:/Code/ProjectName' then you should enter 'cd /c/Code/ProjectName/' into the terminal. Now try and build the project, you can do this using './build.sh'. Once it has finished building the game you can use './run.sh' to run the game.